Mandala

Namaste,

An old caretaker man lies on his back inside an erotic temple with 24 carved images of playful sexual pleasure. He welcomes devotees covered in their piety, devotion, shadows, offering flowers, oil flame light, petals, incense, foot worn stone paths. Interiors.

Ring a bell, many bells, fingerprints wear down stone. Human gestures vibrating bells across a valley.

Endless brick factories fill the Sudal valley. Humans living in brick shacks, using water, clay, wooden forms, creating gray bricks. Sand, dust, hand labor, coal fired smokestacks, piles of coal being crushed, hauled on backs to fire. Fire gray red. The scope and density of men, women and children pouring their lives into their daily effort.

This massive element of people surviving. You walk on streets made of bricks, seeing brick homes rising to blue sky. Brick by brick. 

A mandala. Centering the universe with non-attachment.

The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind. I have no reason to despair because I am already there, sings a Nepalese child.

Gallery.

Metta.

Duende

She had duende, a fundamentally untranslatable Spanish word, literally meaning possessing spirit. It signified a charisma manifested by certain performers—flamenco singers, bullfighters, elves, seers, weavers—overwhelming their audience with the feeling they were in the presence of a mystical power.

The Spanish poet Garcia Lorca produced the best brief description of duende: “Years ago, during a flamenco dance contest in Jerez, an old woman of eighty, competing against beautiful women and young girls with waists as supple as water, carried off the prize by simply raising her arms, throwing back her head, and stamping the platform with a single blow of her heel; but in that gathering of muses and angels, of beautiful forms and lovely smiles, the dying duende triumphed as it had to, dragging the rusted blades of its wings along the ground.”

Little Wing followed a tribal trail to Lacilbula, where, after weaving morning pages she returned to the Rio Guadalete river below the pueblo flowing from the Sierras to Cadiz.

The battle of Guadalete was fought on July 19, 711 when 7,000 Yemenis and Berbers led by Tariq ibn Ziyad defeated the Visgoth King Roderic.

Rio needed cleaning. Thick autumn yellow, green and brown leaves trapped between rocks clogged river sections. Liquid backed up to mountains beneath fast gray storm clouds. Using her walking stick, she clamored down a slippery slope and slowly worked her way up the Rio clearing sticks, leaves and stones blocking the flow. One leaf could do a lot of damage.

There were green maple, silver aspen, brown oak leaves. Old black water logged decayed colors danced with fresh green and orange pigments.

She was the unimpeded flow. A child playing near water and rocks in her dream world. Serenity and sweet water music. Rocks, stepping stones. Small pools and meditation zones of where she felt peaceful. Bird music darted up the canyon.

She cleared leaves long past twilight, staggered up the muddy incline facing the Rio in silent gratitude and performed healing chants next to a bare Aspen tree. She passed a ceramic Virgin Mary statue illuminated by melting red candles in a rocky crevice behind a locked gate.

Mary’s blood flowed over jagged dolomite gray stones flecked with green moss. She collected a hemoglobin sample for future weaving, crossed a stone bridge and returned home. She lit candles, started a fire, relaxed in her favorite chair enjoying a deep breath before bleeding word rivers to dye loom fabric.

The loom was her instrument of transformation and wool the hair of the sacrificial beast which women, by a long and cultured tribal process, transformed into clothing. This suggested how weaving skirts the sacred and the violent. Why her power at the loom was both derided and dreaded, transformed, like giving birth, into a language and symbol, a metaphor with new, positive ends.

apsara

The dancing hall at Preah Khan is where dancers don't smile. They dance. They are slave dancers.

They dance for the king. He is the god-king. He has resurrected his desire and fury creating new customs and new decrees for dancers. They dance for the mighty and powerful. They dance Khmer stories about war, conquest, harvests, seasons, sun and moon. 

They are submissive dances of life/death. They dance to celebrate life. They dance the celebration of tranquility. They dance or die. They wear tinkling bands of gold around wrists and ankles. They wear diamond diademed crowns and shimmering silk clothing. They do not smile. Their faces are frozen in the trance of dance.

One dances to escape the tyranny. She's danced all her short, sweet life.

The hall of dancers is surrounded by columns, portals and broken jumbled green moss stones. Thick gnarled silk-cotton tree roots crawl toward dancers. They dance through roots, past Shiva and Vishnu. The preserver and destroyer of life. 

Dance movement is motivated by emotional expression. Dance is about itself. The freedom of creation. A playful approach to meaning. Dance allows the viewer to interpret. 

 

dance

A young woman with delicate hands, perfect posture, a five pointed gold star painted on her forehead and scuffed white ballet slippers waiting for the train turned to me.

Did you hear Mercy Cunningham, the dancer died?

No. What have you heard?

I study dance, that’s how I know. He was amazing. Dance is all about ambiguity, poetry, and acceptance. He had independent detachment. He had creative imagination. He said dance was isolated yet cooperating and independent. And, he said, because he believed in the magic of dance, that when you dance for a fleeting moment you feel alive.

What do you see? I asked. I see a circle of movement. A connected unity, a language in space. It’s more than that, said a one legged amputee leaning against the wall, There are five rhythms in dance.

You start with a circle, it’s a circular movement from the feminine container. She is earth.

Really? said the woman. Yes, then you have a line, from the hips moving out. This is the masculine action with direction. He is fire.

Chaos is next, a combination of circle and lines where the male and female energies interact. This is the place of transformation.

I see. And then, after chaos is the lyrical, a leap, a release. This is air. And the last element of dance is stillness. Out of stillness is born the next movement.

  

face dust

Greetings,

Walk outside, feel the dust beneath your feet.  Walking is a luxury.

The street blends into the prayer circuit. Two large chorten furnaces breath fire, sending plumes of gray and black smoke into the sky. Figures of all ages and energies, sellers of juniper and cedar. Buyers collect their offerings, throwing sweet smelling twigs into the roaring fire, finger prayer beads and resume their pilgrimage. They flow and shuffle. Feel the softness being with the ageless way of meditation, a walking meditation.

It is a peaceful manifestation of the eternal now. The sky fills with clear light. 

A Cambodian man sits in his WW I wheelchair. His torso ends with two mid thigh leg stubs. 

A young boy in tattered clothing stands on a log. He throws a large girl doll in the air. It spins, performing somersaults. It crashes in the dust. 

He poises on the log, flexes his muscles and jumps. He lands on the doll's face. He smashes his feet dancing on the face, laughing in rising dust. 

At a different ground zero called Tahir Square a young girl referring to Egypt's backward pubic education system that depends so much on repetition holds a sign urging Mubarak to leave quickly, "Make it short. This is history, and we have to memorize it for school."

Metta.